Porirua City Council is set to spend $250,000 for a roving team looking for problems in its ageing water pipes.
Water quality in Porirua harbour will be monitored by the new team. Photo: kayjayimages/123RF
The team - a first for the Wellington region - will look for issues such as cross connections in stormwater and sewage pipes.
It will also monitor water quality in the harbour.
Porirua Mayor Anita Baker said $250,000 had been set aside in the council's draft annual plan for the team.
More than half of Porirua's wastewater pipes are in a poor condition, and it will cost close to $2 billion over the next two to three decades to bring them up to scratch.
"People are reporting leaks all the time.
"We're trying to... find the leaks on people's boundaries and... fix it," Baker said.
Wellington's water infrastructure has also been plagued with burst pipes and outages in recent months including a burst sewerage pipe in the CBD under Dixon Street, and on the south coast a broken wastewater pipe at Moa Point and ongoing problems with Owhiro Bay water quality which often reaches unsafe levels of e-coli.